February 02, 2009

Business models for online news - thesis/antithesis

How to make money from news, in all its formats, was another
theme running throughout the sessions, with implications for many categories of traditionally user-paid content business models represented among the Information Industry Summit registrants. The first day set up a sort of
thesis-antithesis:as previously noted,
Michael Wolff reliably staked out a position at one end of the spectrum – “the
primary strategic question is how we can pay less or nothing for content.”Google has established an absolutely new
model.Not only that, but: traditional
news organizations, he asserted, are “finished,” whether in a year or 18 months
“at the outside.”

Not surprisingly, Vivek Shah, who heads Time Inc.’s digital
news business, took a contrary view.Acknowledging
that “newsgathering as a way of driving revenue is being undermined,” he argued
that the result is a greater emphasis on voice, personality, and point of view,
and asserted that the original Time
was “a version of the Internet” – that is, a way to digest the information
plethora of a different era (“28 daily newspapers in Chicago”). Scale matters, he said, in the
ability to address specific audiences.As
evidence, he stated that [according to at least some measurements] the top 10 news sites on the Web are all traditional
brands, including Time, Inc. properties with a combined 26 million monthly
visitors.

From the “high end” of the news business, Dow Jones
Newswires SVP and managing editor Neal Lipshutz insisted on the endurance of a
paid model for high-value content, including news, and argued for a return to
subscription pricing by the leading daily newspapers [other than the WSJ and
FT, whose business/financial focus adds another dimension to the perceived
conversion value of their information]: “You have to put the genie back in the bottle.”Steve Lohr of the New York Times mused about the
notion of the “top 5 papers” jointly agreeing to charge for online subscriptions,
and later noted that for the online-print advertising revenue crossover model
to work, “you need a lot more numbers” in the audience.

Robert Merry, president and editor-in-chief of Congressional
Quarterly, also insisted that newspapers had “missed the boat” by ceding the
circulation fight to their readers.But
he cast a skeptical eye on lamentations about end of professional journalism,
noting that the familiar model of “objective” journalistic brands has been a relatively
short-lived phenomenon. We may be
returning to the kind of environment he saw from his recent writing about the
1840s, when all US newspapers were clearly – and usually fiercely – partisan;
and readers were, as today, free to form their opinions from multiple sources,
or have them confirmed by particular, reliably partisan, voices.

I actually decided to make a quick movie about this, I would be honored if you could maybe take a minute to look it and perhaps leave a message about what you think, I left the movie link in the "website" field, hopefully you can get to it, thanks a lot